Intel has done nothing it can stand behind since the pentium 3. That chip was amazing. They had to dead end P4 development and go back to a P3 base to develop core. Now I betcha they will now have to dead end core and go back to P3 again. It could be competitive with a die shrink, clock boost (3.5Ghz P3? drooool), a newer instruction set (I'm sure it's fast enough to decode, and intel is good at adding accelerators), and then running a ton of them on a single socket like AMD is doing. Maybe pair it with some optane for instant boot or some gimick. It'd sell.

As much fun as a 4 GHz Tualatin 4- or 8-core CPU sounds, it would probably take several years of development to make something usable by today's standards.